The event’s student guide reads that the week purports to expose two “Big Lies” of the political and academic left: “that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.” Of course this is a ham-fisted assertion taking aim at a body of people so large and diverse that logic deems such unity on the two matters far too improbable–which seems to deny the event any intelligent thrust and make it all hard to take seriously. Last week, Revolution seemed to get a lukewarm response from its readership. Some thought to let the wackos have their days in the sun while parts of the world go on getting wrecked by war and famine.

But we can’t ignore it, says Toby O’Ryan of the Revolution. After all, there’s something Gestapo about the activities: for one, students are encouraged walk around presenting Muslim students and administrators with a “petition denouncing Islamo-Fascist violence against women, gays, Christians, Jews and non-religious people.” A refusal to sign, it seems, means being the enemy of America and enabler for the Islamic terrorist movement against women, gays, Christians, Jews and all other rational and free-thinking peoples.

O’Ryan sees a crucial victory for the Horowitzian nutcases if the revolutionaries ignore the events. What to do? “The only way to make people feel compelled to examine those assumptions is by effectively challenging them with the truth—with hard-hitting and documented facts to back it up,” he writes. “That means taking on and tearing to shreds Horowitz’s arguments and bringing forward the truth in opposition to that.”

Finally, he engages the proverbial Alamo routine, drawing a line in the sand: “There can be no bystanders; the question is whether the right side of this argument will speak up with all the power and sweep that it can muster and not only prevent a worsening polarization on campus, but start to change things for the better.”